Bill Skarsgård Has One Regret About His Look In The Crow Remake

In August, undead antihero Eric Draven will rise from his grave to wreak vengeance for the first time in years. In the new version of cult favorite "The Crow," Bill Skarsgård is set to take over the role that was originated by Brandon Lee, who died tragically during filming on the project in 1993. All eyes have been trained on the remake for a few reasons, including the fact that the project was trapped in development hell for years. Every time the "Crow" reboot stopped and started, a certain faction of superstitious film buffs re-asserted that it was "cursed."

Now that production has safely wrapped, the first trailer has dropped, and the remake's release date is around the corner, all eyes are still on the movie for another reason: Skarsgård's headline-grabbing Joker-ified transformation into the goth icon of the '90s. The aesthetics of "The Crow" is the stuff Hot Topic makeup lines are made of: the new version of Eric starts off with more than a few face tattoos, but after he and his fiancé are killed, he re-emerges with dark, smeary makeup and pitch-black streaks down his face. In the latest issue of Empire Magazine, Skarsgård admitted that it wasn't actually the character's Tate Langdon aesthetic that he wished he could have a redo on, but his body type. "I felt very strange being in great shape for Eric," he told the outlet with a laugh. "I wanted him to be really skinny!"

Rewatch the footage from "The Crow" that's been released so far, and it's easy to see what Skarsgård means. The character has all the hallmarks of the type of mentally unwell fictional being that's typically shot staring at their concave bodies in the mirror, like Joaquin Phoenix's Joker or Christian Bale's character in "The Machinist." Yet he's more than a little ripped, the apparent result of the film the actor was working on just before "The Crow" started shooting. According to Empire, Skarsgård had just wrapped the dystopian action flick "Boy Kills World" (aka the assassin movie narrated by "Bob's Burgers" star H. Jon Benjamin) when he got to work on "The Crow," and had been abiding by an intensive training regimen and diet for that film.

"He was not a person that worked out, ever," Skarsgård says of the character he plays in "The Crow." In the original 1994 film, Lee's protagonist was a rock musician. The trailer for the "Crow" reboot, which will draw in part from James O'Barr's 1989 comic book series, shows Eric meeting his fiancee Shelley (FKA Twigs) in a prison-like setting, but it also sees the two spend an evening at what seems to be a carefree fireside party. While it might make sense for the undead, superhero version of Eric to appear buff for head-smashing reasons, it apparently doesn't fit in with the character's lifestyle otherwise. "In a perfect world he would have been a lot less fit in the first half of the movie," Skarsgård explained.

The actor, whose commitment to his craft shines through in roles like that of Pennywise the clown (in 2017's mega-hit Stephen King adaptation "IT" and its sequel), and this one was no exception. "You have to go there," he told Empire, noting that he doesn't "know any other way of doing" a performance like this without getting deep into the character's psyche. Skarsgård was particularly interested in the character's descent into nihilism. "That became very important to me — that it's not just a guy putting on make-up and thinking he's badass and saying catchy one-liners," he said. "This is someone who has lost everything, and the only thing that he has left is his hate. And hate is destructive."

As with his performance as Pennywise, which Skarsgård once described as akin to "being in a very destructive relationship," the actor's turn as The Crow sounds pretty exhausting. "You do get a little bit consumed with that state of mind," he told interviewers. "I was kind of burned out at the end of it, for physical reasons, mental reasons, all of it. It was a lot." One thing he didn't seem to have difficulty with? Tackling a story with ties to a film with the complex legacy of the original. According to the actor, the differences are key. "I think I would have been more hesitant if it felt really close to the original," he explained, "but the fact that it felt so different from it, the separation of it [made it feel like I could] make this my own thing, as opposed to trying but failing at something that's already been done."

"The Crow" hits theaters on August 23, 2024.